There are several ways to get the LAMMPS software, either as a tarball, from an active repository, or in executable form:
- Download a tarball (here or from the LAMMPS Releases page on GitHub), see the tarball install docs
- Clone the git repository for LAMMPS
- Install pre-built or auto-build Linux executables
- Auto-build macOS executables
- Install pre-built Windows packages
- Install pre-built Linux or macOS executables via Conda
With source code, you have to build LAMMPS
using cmake or make, but you have more flexibility as to what features to
include or exclude in the build. If you plan to
modify or extend LAMMPS, then you need
the source code. The Install doc page
lists what is included in the LAMMPS distribution.
Download a tarball
Select the code you want, click the Download button, and your browser should download a gzipped tar file. Unpack it with the following command, and see the README file to get started.
tar -xzvf file.tar.gz
There were ~405,000 downloads of LAMMPS source code tarballs from Sept 2004 through mid-year 2021. At that point we migrated our website to https://www.lammps.org and a different server. On the new server there were ~130,000 downloads in the period from June 2021 to August 2025. In addition there are downloads through the LAMMPS git repository on GitHub; these are difficult to quantify since they also include the downloads from the automated testing environment.
Current LAMMPS source tarballs
| Release Type | Version | Description | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stable Release | 22 Jul 2025 | Latest stable release. 216 MB tarball with source and docs, GPLv2
license. Last updated 16 Apr 2026 (update 4). Includes all bug fixes and new features described on the releases page page, up to the date of the most recent stable release plus bugfixes backported from more recent feature releases. | Download | Manual |
| Feature Release | 4 Jul 2026 | Latest feature release. 261 MB tarball with source and docs, GPLv2 license. Includes all bug fixes and new features described on the releases page page. | Download | Manual |
Important legacy versions of LAMMPS
| Version | Description | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Jul 2025 | Last version of LAMMPS compatible with C++11 and including ATC, AWPMD, and POEMS. GPLv2 license, 216 MB, last updated 16 April 2026 (update 4). | Download | Manual in tarball |
| 3 Mar 2020 | Last version of LAMMPS compatible with C++98. GPLv2 license, 164 MB, last updated 3 Mar 2020. | Download | Manual in tarball |
| LAMMPS 2001 | Older f90 version source tarball. GPLv2 license, 1.1 MB, last updated 17 Jan 2005. | Download | Manual |
| LAMMPS 99 | Older f77 version source tarball. GPLv2 license, 844 kB. | Download | Manual |
Additional LAMMPS plugins
You can find the source code for additional LAMMPS plugins that have been ported to compile with recent LAMMPS versions (but otherwise not checked for correctness) in the LAMMPS plugins git repository on GitHub.
License and older versions
All versions of LAMMPS are distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License Version 2. The earlier Fortran versions are no longer under active development.
To determine what version of LAMMPS you already have, see this page.
You can download older versions of LAMMPS by going to this page and selecting the version you want, based on the date in the tarball file name.
Older parallel MD codes (ParaDyn, LJ) and the Python-based Pizza.py package, which provides pre- and post-processing and viz tools for LAMMPS, are available for download from this page.